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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

Very off topic, every time I see nvidia expand towards AI products I'm reminded that they had every opportunity to expand towards crypto products and didn't. I like that they work on what they believe in - and skip if they don't. In a time when AI is becoming a buzzword, this feels refreshing.

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Do people have short memories? Nvidia did a lot of shady stuff during the crypto boom, they made dedicated mining cards [1], they even software gimped gaming cards to force people to buy their mining cards as well[2]. Nvidia is a shitty anti consumer company that has no issues fucking you over. Don't forget that or let their PR department make you think otherwise.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/nvidia-will-add-anti...

They gimped consumer GPU cards because crypto miners were buying them all and their core gamer market was being priced out. Making dedicated mining cards was actually trying to do less for crypto, not more.

crypto miners were buying them all because nvidia were selling directly to crypto miners entire production runs of cards

I've heard someone say they did that because randomly this new type of buyer affected their sales tremendously and they had zero insight into how that market behaved. By establishing separate product lines and sales channels they could in theory better distinguish between their products doing good because of competitive gaming performance, or random fluctuations in the crypto market. That way an investor/shareholder could more accurately price the stock.

I have no idea if they were successful at achieving that goal, just thought it was interesting that market differentiation wouldn't just be useful for marketing but also for corporate accounting. They would even risk alienating the crypto market and possibly lose revenue, if it would mean they'd get a better handle on what they were selling to whom.

I’m sure market segmentation was part of the decision. I talked to a high up person at Nvidia about their general strategy around gaming. Nvidia sells graphics cards by having the absolute best graphics performance for gaming. This isn’t purely about raw compute power. There are lots of graphics extensions and features available to game developers on Nvidia that aren’t available elsewhere. If game developers use these extensions, they get a better looking game when played on Nvidia hardware. This comes with a cost, however; it’s more work to use these extra rendering features when developing a game. If gamers can’t buy Nvidia GPUs, then there isn’t a reason for game developers to use Nvidia’s proprietary features. If game developers don’t use the proprietary features, then games don’t look that much better on an Nvidia card. This makes Nvidia a less desirable choice for gamers.

If Nvidia did something that sounds pro-consumer in any way, it’s not because they give a damn about consumers, it’s because it coincidentally made good business sense also

No, it was trying to stop their sales from being destroyed whenever a crypto crash happened and all the mining GPUs wound up in a firesale. So they made hardware that would guaranteed become e-waste in a few years instead.

> and didn't

Uh huh.

> Nvidia will pay $5.5 million to settle charges that it unlawfully obscured how many of its graphics cards were sold to cryptocurrency miners...

And

> The CMP HX is a pro-level cryptocurrency mining GPU that provides maximum performance...

Just a quick google away.

Nvidia will develop and sell whatever will make Nvidia more money. They just think the world of AI is two or three orders of magnitude more lucrative than mining ever was. Hence the maximum push on the AI front.

Crypto mining using GPUs has crashed. Ether was the main source of profit, and the shift away from proof of work dried that up. Bitcoin requires ASICs without the market for nvidia, and recent conditions made this only worse.

Nvidia knows their biggest revenue sources today, which are growing, and is investing into their business units based on that data.

It’s just smart business.

> Nvidia will pay $5.5 million to settle charges that it unlawfully obscured how many of its graphics cards were sold to cryptocurrency miners...

This is because they didn't serve the market... so they didn't understand how many buyers were coming from crypto.

Fellow organic user, I also find the outlook and integrity of Nvidia™ extremely refreshing. Finally a company we can believe in to play the game The Way It's Meant To Be Played™

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's a dumb rule that often deserves to be broken. Appeal to authority is an abdication of responsibility.

Can we get a rule that bans copying and pasting the rules into comments? It’s just noise that lowers the quality of discussion.

And most of the time, the person isn’t even breaking any rules. In this case, I’m pretty sure they were making a joke and didn’t actually think that a longtime HN user was astroturfing

"a company we can believe in" should be the subtitle of Hacker News.

Very naive to think profit oriented company have beliefs and convictions... Religion of money is way stronger.

Weird statement. Of course Nvidia has belief: they believe AI will brings more profit in long term than crypto will.

Following a juicy trend doesn't mean you believe in it, also gpu mining is not a thing anymore in crypto. Nvidia has nothing to bring to cryptos.

> is not a thing anymore

Isn’t this very recent?

Why not both?

Even if they believe in a technology because they believe they can deliver a profitable product (and reject something else because they think there’s no long term gains), I still prefer that to a company which would blindly try to profit from everything short term.

I wouldn't be very sure of that. It would be very hard to sell $30k GPU for crypto, like they are doing for AI, as AI requirement is different than gaming while crypto is not. The flop/s difference in A100($15k card) and 4090($1.5k card) is just 2x. Nvidia could constrain VRAM for consumer cards because 24 GB is enough for games or AI inference.

> Nvidia could constrain VRAM for consumer cards because 24 GB is enough for games or AI inference.

Given some of the commentary in launch reviews for the 4000 series, I wouldn't be surprised if the overwhelming opinion was that they already are.

Maybe they are hype immune - clearly crypto is zero sum and somewhat seasonal. Machine learning (and matmul and relu in particular) is here to stay and will expand.

These are real pros doing products, they know what’s real, not helping grifters pumping to pass bags, I.e hedge funds, banks, startups, influencers

I think you just aren’t aware of what NVidia was doing over the last few years.

How do you feel about the GeForce Partner Program?

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